Without any shame for being happy

Tears of happiness and sadness battle with each other, washing my hay fever eyes clean. Richly the opposing emotions and fragments of thoughts flow through my head and body. Floating along on this, I write down freely everything that comes into my mind and goes through my mind, until the words on paper bring all the streams together into one main stream...life!  

First, those streams of tears for the deterioration of two strong tough men in my life.

Dad Henk who struggles with the Parkinson's disease, on which I look after so Mom can go out for a nice workout to stay on her feet. When he has a good day we do some painting together with some nice jazz music in the background in his atelier, where the sadness of saying goodbye to more and more bits of quality of life for him and mom - who is his everything - is also in the air. 

And Goran, my love, who never complains but experiences constant lots of pain and limitations in energy and strength since his spinal cord infarction a year and a half ago. He wants so desperately to become better and start working again, but recovery seems impossible and accepting that takes courage. Together with the Heliomare rehabilitation centre we strive for less pain, sleeping better, being able to cycle again or go for a long walk. I feel a sense of powerlessness and sadness for him and for the permanent change in our nice lives together. 

The four of us are laughing about "the bed daddy. This device could help Dad, with his body painfully bruised by a fall, to get out of bed by himself to pee at night so that Mom can get back to sleep. After two hours of plodding by me and Goran to install it, within ten minutes we see that it’s impossible for Dad to use and is confusing him, so we immediately break it down again. The following night Dad does get out of bed on his own anyway, just the horror thought of that bed parrot is enough to achieve this. 

Fortunately, in addition to this grief, my "regular" work, informal care and PGB applications, I also purposefully take care of plenty of fun ambitious projects that give me energy. Like publishing the MeGaZin that I already wrote internationally in English this year, a synopsis for a possible article in the expert magazine TVOO - not coincidentally in the theme edition 'balance' - and competing in the TEDxAmsterdamWomen Talent Night, whose theme this year is 'Let's celebrate'. I need that too in order to live life to the fullest! 

I don't want to have to explain myself anymore and think of my life song 'Without Shame for Happiness' that I wrote last year at the completion of a master class at Sporen. I was under the impression that the accompanying musicians of the Pearl Divers would sing it for me, but things turned out differently. How? I just looked it up again so listen for yourself....